Muzzling Doctors: A Selection from Nicholas A. Christakis’s Apollo’s Arrow (2020)

“In Bellingham, Washington, not far from Seattle, during the peak of the outbreak, Dr. Ming Lin was terminated after seventeen years of working at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center because he posted pleas for personal protective equipment on Facebook and decried the fact that the hospital was not serious enough about protecting patients and health-care workers. Dr. Lin (who had previously worked in New York City during the 9/11 attacks) expressed his wholly appropriate concern about the hospital refusing to screen all patients for the virus outside of the facility before bringing them inside the crowded emergency department, which might contribute to spread of the infection. When I first heard about this case, I marveled at the chutzpah and absurdity of firing a doctor for speaking out in the middle of an epidemic when he was actually needed most.

One orthopedic surgeon working in an urban COVID-19 hot spot in the Northeast reported, ‘We get a daily warning about being very prudent about posts on personal accounts. They’ve talked about this with respect to various issues: case numbers, case severity, testing availability, and PPEs.’ An attending physician at a hospital in Indiana posted a plea on social media for N95 masks. Administrators warned him not to do it again, because it would make the hospital seem incompetent. In Chicago, Lauri Mazurkiewicz, a nurse at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, was fired after sending an e-mail to her colleagues expressing the desire to wear more PPE on duty. One of her concerns was that she might bring the virus back to her seventy-five-year-old father, who suffered from respiratory disease. There were far too many such incidents in the United States in the spring of 2020.

Hospitals around the country issued ham-fisted edicts trying to stop personnel from speaking out. At the New York University Langone Health System in New York City, the executive vice president for communications and marketing informed the faculty and staff that all media inquiries had to be directed to her office. She continued, ‘Anyone who does not adhere to this policy, or who speaks or disseminates information to the media without explicit permission of the Office of Communications and Marketing, will be subject to disciplinary action, including termination.’ To put it mildly, the professors of medicine who worked in this hospital did not appreciate this note, as some of them informed me. . . .

The muzzling of doctors also took place at the highest levels of our government. President Trump sidelined and nearly fired Dr. Nancy Messonnier, a CDC official who was the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, because during a press conference on February 25, 2020, she honestly noted that the CDC was preparing for a pandemic. She said, ‘It’s not a question of if this will happen, but when this will happen, and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses.’ The president did not like the fact that her statement resulted in a slight decline in the stock market—as if keeping quiet about the impending pandemic would prevent either the disease or the economic losses it would inevitably cause. In fact, one of the great travesties of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has been the undermining and muzzling of the widely respected CDC. On that same day, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar absurdly claimed the virus was ‘contained’ in the United States. But we cannot beat the virus with silence or with lies. Only truth and a megaphone help in such fights.”—Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of the Coronavirus on the Way We Live (2020)